


wide have i wandered

by limerental



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, God Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Immortal Jaskier | Dandelion, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:13:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26647324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Yennefer reaches through the storm and grips her bone-white staff tight in both hands. She feels, for a moment, the curve of the earth slipping away in every direction, the pressure of the atmosphere above, the molten core beneath, and then, she allows the feeling to dissipate through her extremities, through the ones confined to her physical, womanly shape and to the ones that flicker beyond this plane.Odin!Yennefer & Jaskier ficlet originally posted to tumblr
Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	wide have i wandered

She rides in on the updraft of a storm. Both armies have already limped from the scarred swathe of the field, what was once rows of cabbage and barley churned to wet muck by hoof and boot.

It is there that she finds him.

He is a little thing.

Not in the breadth of his shoulders or his height, both of which are quite average for a human male of this time period, but in his years and in his naivety and in his importance.

He is but eighteen and wears delicate silks in his lord’s colors. Decorative, extravagant, the trappings and embroidery custom ordered just for such an occasion. To follow some nothing lord of a piddling estate into battle, dancing at the heels of his mighty war steed, singing some drivel or another written in his honor. The snap of the lord’s banner in the breeze and the march of the army’s stride serving as perfect percussive accompaniment to the cool, clear voice of the bard and the fluttering notes of his instrument.

The silks are ruined now, of course. The once vibrant fabric has taken on the color of the field, the seams split and torn, as the flesh has been beneath. The bard’s instrument is in a similar state. A fine-boned lute, once polished smooth and painted in swirling florals. Now bowed and cracked, the strings frayed on its twisted neck.

The lord sprawls in the mud beneath his dappled horse, the beast still groaning in its fading agony, a guttural sound of lungs more blood than air.

The bard is a little thing. Curled dead at his lord’s side.

She feels the clap of thunder before it breaks over the battlefield, scents the wind and flicks her hand. Fat raindrops sluice away from her and the boy’s body, leaving the storm to stir his chestnut hair but not dampen it.

The horse groans again, eyes rolling, shivering in the mud, and she waits as it dies, thrashing with renewed vigor and wuffling toward the very end. A fine animal, but she has no need of a mount, and death throes make it ever so hard to concentrate.

She is here for a song.

The animal dies.

Yennefer reaches through the storm and grips her bone-white staff tight in both hands. She feels, for a moment, the curve of the earth slipping away in every direction, the pressure of the atmosphere above, the molten core beneath, and then, she allows the feeling to dissipate through her extremities, through the ones confined to her physical, womanly shape and to the ones that flicker beyond this plane. 

She holds her staff aloft and for a moment, it is a spear. It is a sword. It is a bolt of lightning.

And she thwacks the bard dead center in the forehead.

“Ouch,” he exclaims as he leaps right to his feet. “Fucking uncalled for. What kind of healer are you meant to be? Going about knocking the heads of upstanding young lads who’ve done nothing but have a bit of a nap during battle. I’m awake, I’m awake! Just got a smidge tired is all. Had a bit of a lie-down. Now where’s Lord Pendergast got off to? Now where’s– oh.”

The bard stills, a seeming impossibility, as he notices the carnage around him and the abrupt fall of his facial features could have been construed as comical if she did not already know what sort of man he is. Or was. She always manages to forget the subtle nuances of mortal life.

He too will forget in time.

Of course, for now, he does not know a thing about any of it and so begins to wail. A high, dramatic call of mourning that rings with perfect clarity across the stormswept field. Far too perfect not to be at least partially contrived. The bard is an actor, after all. She knows that all the best actors practice their mourning wails ahead of time.

He howls and beats his chest and sniffles better than the best of them.

She keeps him dry under the envelope of air that slicks with rivulets but ponders allowing the rain to touch him. He may delight in the ambience a wretched downpour would provide, she thinks. As it is, she waits with the same stillness and quiet as she waited on the stricken horse to die. He sounds nearly identical, frankly.

“Are you quite finished?” 

He looks at her then, all artfully snot-nosed and watery-eyed with mud smeared up to his collar and dried blood caked down to his heels.

She blinks and sees herself as he sees her. She is crooked, half-hunched against the carved staff she bears, and she appears as a woman, ambiguous in age, humming faintly in the way that all sorcerers do. Her tattered cloak trails at her ankles, the raised hood shadowing her half-paralyzed face, but her violet eyes are not obscured, her gaze revealing all that this body does not. 

For those who look closely enough, at least.

He looks closely.

She blinks and sees his throat bob as he swallows his fear, and he says, “suppose you aren’t a healer, then.”

“You suppose correctly,” she says.

“Suppose I am… uh… I’m…”

He picks at the front of his bloodied and tattered silks. 

“You were not napping,” she says, “if that’s what you are attempting to babble inanely about.”

“I babble inanely just fine,” he says and puffs up his chest. 

“I realize.” She laughs, and the clouds laugh along with her, flickering with lightning.

“Oi! I don’t find this all that humorous actually. This is not a giggle-worthy situation, just you know. I’ve apparently up and died. I’ve apparently snuffed it. I don’t know that there’s anything worth jesting about. Just think of all the wines I’ve never sampled, the maidens I’ll never deflower, the riches I’ll never–”

She sighs. Counts backwards from ten. How can a man so recently dead yet have the breath in his lungs for such irritating chatter?

“Enough,” she says, and the storm answers her in a deafening roll of thunder, a hum of static, a patter of rain against their envelope of dryness.

The bard shuts his mouth with a clack.

For a moment.

“Who are you?” he asks, and her mouth tightens into a smile because she likes answering this question most of all. She likes the way a new name tastes in her mouth. She likes to hear it tremble on the air.

“I am Yennefer,” she says, and her tongue curls nicely around the syllables.

“Right,” says the bard, “you can call me Jaskier.”

“Jaskier,” she repeats, the name sweet and floral on her lips. 

Yes, she likes how this one tastes. She likes how he looks at her, the thrill of awe held in his too-blue eyes. Too blue to still be wholly mortal. Never to wrinkle with crow’s feet. Never again to bug with split blood vessels in a last deadly convulsion on the muck of a field of battle.

“Come, poet,” she says and taps her staff against the earth, feels something ripple beneath her bare feet. He feels it too and yelps aloud at the vibration in his soles, and then, the storm has vanished and the battlefield fades and all that is left is a rush of stars and the sweeping arc of a portal. “You have stories yet to tell.”


End file.
